Monday, October 22, 2012

A few players have recently expressed some frustrations with NEO Scavenger, which brought up some questions about core design. In particular, the concerns centered around the combination of permadeath, save games, and randomness.

Game Design

The frustrations stem from the game ending, irrevocably, as a result of chance in-game hardships. I think most players would agree that investing significant time into an RPG character, and then losing it to a die roll, is a real buzz-kill. Some will sigh and re-roll a character, others will walk away for a while, and still others may rage quit, never to return. Whichever is the case, such an occurrence in-game is poor game design. Instead of the player suffering a penalty due to poor choices, they suffered due to bad luck.

A powerful storytelling tool. Also, sucks when it happens to you.

In defining NEO Scavenger, I eventually settled on the idea that I was making a single player computer RPG that could simulate many of the experiences had in a pen and paper RPG session. And many of the game's systems are successes in that regard. For example:

players can customize their character

there are multiple ways to use the player's skills and items meaningfully

there are elements of strategy and tactics

there are setting and plot elements to discover

there are options to role-play moral choices.

With the addition of a permadeath save feature, it's even possible to save progress, walk away, and return later: just like one does in a role playing session with friends.

One thing NEO Scavenger lacks, however, is a game master (GM). A good GM does many things in a session. From creating the story, to arbitrating the outcome of conflict and struggle, the GM is a human element which ensures the game is fun for the players. And when an unlucky die roll threatens to spoil the game, a good GM can find ways to fudge the outcome, or interpret the roll in a way that adds drama, rather than removing the fun.

Unfortunately, when misfortune strikes in NEO Scavenger, there's no such GM to ensure the player is having fun. And quite often, this misfortune is game-ending. So, what can be done to fix this?

Save Games

On a few occasions, players have suggested save games as a way to mitigate this problem. With checkpoints and save slots a common feature in many games these days, I can see why. It's an easy way to ensure a player's invested time is not lost. Like an insurance policy, the player can resume where their last save left off, minimizing the amount of time spent replaying existing content.

However, as I've discussed before, knowing one can just reload the game at any time robs the game of two powerful tools: fear and consequence. Thankfully, most players seem to be on board with this philosophy. They enjoy the game exactly for this hardcore nature, and diminishing that would diminish the game as a whole for them.

(Incidentally, players who want to can still circumvent the save-delete by making a copy of the save file, a la Nethack. I'm happy to leave this intact for players who really want it.)

Ultimately, I want the player to have the convenience of playing when they want, but I don't want to use save games to fix what may be a design flaw in the mechanics. So if save games are just a band-aid, what's the actual problem?

Randomness

From the outset, NEO Scavenger has leaned pretty hard on randomness. From random map hexes, to random combat outcomes, Math.random() was a crutch I used liberally.

Randomness isn't inherently bad, mind you. It's a pretty valuable tool for making the game interesting more than once. It can provide fresh environments to explore, a seemingly deeper AI, or random bouts of luck or misfortune to tip the scales of drama.

However, too much randomness can be bad, especially where life and death of a player's character is concerned. If a player feels like their choices don't matter, and that the game will simply reward/punish them at random, then they won't enjoy the game. Or, at least, the type of player I'm building this game for (i.e. me) won't.

Note to self: These are decision-making tools, not decision makers.

One of NEO Scavenger's earliest failures was combat. There was a random chance of injury imposed on the player for participating. In many cases, that injury was instantly fatal.

Players reported feeling that the game would randomly kill them, and felt frustrated because there were no mitigating strategies. One simply hoped for a good outcome each turn. In fact, most simply chose to ignore and avoid combat entirely, instead focusing on more rewarding and enjoyable areas of the game.

Fortunately, we were able to identify this, and we found ways to make combat more interactive. We gave the player more verbs in combat, and more nouns for them to act upon.

Instead of a short "overall injury" meter, the player now had multiple wound locations, blood supply, pain, and infections to manage. Instead of deciding whether to "hit" or "run," the combatants now had additional moves they could choose from, like "trip," "tackle," or "lure into trap." And the addition of situational factors, such as terrain, morale, cover, lighting, and stance, meant that the player could opt for different strategies as the battle changed.

What this did was allow players to see trouble in its early stages, and gave them time to deal with it. There was still randomness, but it was relegated to minor victories and losses. The overall life and death of the player was largely in their hands, and they were left to choose when a reward was worth the sacrifice.

This is still a weak point for NEO Scavenger, and effort still goes into finding ways to strengthen it. I think we're on to something, though. In the linked example above, I think we've identified some tangible causes of frustration, and we're discussing in-game solutions that might help. It has a familiar ring to it: games are more fun if the player's choices determine victory or defeat, not random chance.

Replayability

While randomness is surely a weak point for NEO Scavenger, there's one other area I'm keeping an eye on. That area is the replayability, especially in the early game.

If a player is afraid of dying, that's a good thing, in my mind. It puts them in the right frame of mind for enjoying this game of survival, and making each decision count. It's what most players cite as their reason for enjoying NEO Scavenger, and it enhances the thrill of the game.

However, some players have reported feeling turned off when dying, to the point that they do not want to play again. This might point to a separate problem, one which has more to do with the fun factor in the early portion of the game. In other words, it seems that if the early game was lots of fun, players probably wouldn't mind dying as much.

For example, I'm always willing to start a new game of Civ 4/5 or Galactic Civ II. The early game is one of my favorite parts. There are even times when I'll cut an existing game short so that I can restart.

Mind you, I still enjoy the mid-late games too. But I never feel disdain as my civilization starts to collapse, because I look forward to the next go.

In fact, that was often the case for me with pen and paper RPGs, too. Rolling new characters was "half the fun" for me. I loved exploring other strategies, backstories, and those first few struggles to get one's feet.

I'd like that to be the case for NEO Scavenger, too. So when players say that the Game Over screen gives them pause, I start to wonder if NEO Scavenger's mid-late game is the compelling part, and the start is just a barrier. Is there something really fun happening just before death, that the player is trying to get to as quickly as possible next time? Is the early game too boring or tedious?

So far, when I've asked about this, the general response is that the early game is ok. And frankly, the game is probably short enough that there's little to no mid-late game anyway. Still, it's on my mind. More something I'm monitoring than actively working on.

Perhaps addressing the randomness issue will have an effect on the early game? If players feel more enabled, and that their choice caused death, they'll be more engaged in the character building process? Or perhaps the character building process itself is too limited? Perhaps there's not enough encouragement to experiment?

One thing at a time, I guess. Changing too much at once can muddle the results, so we'll deal with the obvious problem first. Perhaps the way forward will be more obvious after this obstacle is cleared.

Every few days, they announce new goals, such as mp3 albums at 6500, or additional games at 8500 units sold.

Revenue is split among the developers/writers/musicians, and a 20% cut goes to a charity. In this case, it's MercyCorps.

Wait, Isn't NEO Scavenger Still in Beta?

Yes, it is. I told myself I'd wait on participating in bundles until later in the dev cycle. Perhaps once it was gold and sales had died down. In fact, I gently turned down the first invite from Groupees (as I did with other bundle providers).

Looking over their previous Be Mine and other bundles, they regularly net about 5k units sold. 10 on more successful runs. Some even quote dollaramounts, which was helpful. I estimated that an average run for them was about 5k units sold, at about $5 per unit.

Given the number of titles per bundle (~5 games, plus 3-8 books and albums), and that 20% goes to charity, I expected the revenue share to be pretty low. And running the numbers, it was probably on the order of a few thousand dollars.

Just to be clear, a few thousand dollars is nothing to shake a stick at. That pays rent, utilities, and groceries for a month or two. But I was afraid of what revenue I'd be giving up selling at pennies on the dollar. What if this saturates my market? Would I be selling myself out of future revenue for a short burst now?

On the other hand, that's potentially 5000 new people playing the game. Potentially 5000 new people talking about it. In exchange for the majority of revenue per copy, I get more copies sold, and more publicity. And as many indies have already figured out, raising awareness is at least half the battle.

"What the hell," I decided. I was pretty sure there were more than 5000 people out there who'd buy NEO Scavenger. In fact, I'd bet there could even be 50,000, judging by some voodoo napkin math when looking at Playtomic play stats, Steam Greenlight votes, sales, page hits, etc.

When Groupees got back to me, I decided to ask for more info. Their offer was about what I expected, though their sales expectations were much higher. (They originally had some lofty titles in negotiation, which probably skewed those estimates.) A few emails later, I decided to sign the contract.

So? Was It Worth It?

As is always the case with data at Game Dev Gone Rogue, things are still developing :)

The BM5 bundle launched last Thursday (Oct. 4th) at midnight. The offer runs for 2 weeks, so we're coming up on the end of week 1. As of this post, the bundle is selling better than my expectations, and more in-line with their other Be Mine bundles:

Figure 1: Not bad!

Of course, units can sell for as little as $1. However, the highest donation so far was $425, and with a bonus offered at $5, I expect we'll see an average price of $4-5 per bundle.

Web traffic also increased. The BM5 promotion roughly doubled visitors over the past few days:

Figure 2: Also not bad!

Given that the BM5 site doesn't directly link to bluebottlegames.com, that's pretty cool. It means a lot of people are bothering to learn more about NEO Scavenger than usual.

"Wait, BM5 doesn't link to your product page? What gives?"

True, this might seem a bit counter-intuitive. Though readers who have run promotions before won't be too surprised. The point is to sell bundles, and raise money for charity, first and foremost. So it doesn't make sense for them to lead viewers to another purchase option directly.

However, they were good enough to direct-link to my Greenlight page. And the effects were pretty staggering:

Fligure 3: Blowing the average out of the water.

This is what game authors see on their Greenlight dashboard. It's a graph showing voting trends over the past week, compared to what an average top 100 game in Greenlight gets. The tiny green slivers on Wednesday and Thursday are what I'm used to seeing.

Following the BM5 launch, though, NEO Scavenger skyrocketed to four times the top 100 average, and is still holding at several multiples above what it used to be. What's more, NEO Scavenger ascended ranks from #71 to #62 in a matter of days. As a Greenlight promotion tool, BM5 was an unequivocal success.

So What About Sales?

What about the thing that scared me? Did the bundle cannibalize sales?

So far, that's a definite "no." In fact, I'm still watching the data to see if it might actually be the reverse. Sales at Desura appear almost unchanged so far. They're the usual spike-and-trough I've been seeing in days previous to BM5.

Sales through bluebottlegames.com, however, have either not changed or increased (depending on the weekend effect). These direct sales fluctuate a lot, even before BM5, so it's hard to pinpoint cause and effect. What I can say is that the days following BM5 have been better than average, but not-quite-media-event big.

Conclusion

Am I glad I did it? I am, actually. I won't know for some time whether there were any cannibalizing effects, and what the final tallies are in terms of sales and publicity. But it has definitely helped in the past few days, and might be just the kind of surge needed to level-up NEO Scavenger's success.

Plus, I was treated to some really entertaining mini-reviews of NEO Scavenger in unsuspecting players' hands:

MagSlugIt's like a Choose Your Own Adventure book combined with the early "explore the world" phase from a Civilization game combined with that one scene from They Live where Keith David and Rowdy Roddy Piper beat each other up in an alley.

or this pair:

Robert MillerWho cares? As an indie bundle addict with hundreds of steam games I've never touched, I can say that Neo Scavenger is by far my favourite game in this bundle. It's tons of fun, even if it is still in Alpha and incredibly difficult.

nickelpatRobert: I feel the same way. I bought it for Stranger's Wrath, but thought "Ah, what the hell, might as well check out this non-Steam piece of crap game." Yeah... still playing it.

Encouragement doesn't pay the bills, but it definitely feeds the soul :)

Every indie game and studio needs different things, so this isn't a one-size-fits-all case. But it's yet another valuable tool to consider when growing a brand. There's no doubt that bundles are a fast way to ratchet up awareness of your game. And it gets you a small boost in income.

On the flip side, it's sales at a fraction of the revenue you're probably used to. Especially if you sell your game in the double-digit dollar range.

I'll probably shy away from doing more bundles in the near future, at least until NEO Scavenger gets further along. I have a feeling that even in successful cases like this one, I would see diminishing returns from overusing the bundle approach. I'd like to try out some other tools before coming back to bundles.

However, I'll definitely be looking into bundles for later in the NEO Scavenger sales cycle, as well as for future titles.